Rārangi kōrero

I notice the "new" brief heading "Ētahi atu", which the Reed Pocket Dictionary of Modern Māori says just means "others". I wonder if it's too brief to be a standard heading replacing my tentative standard, "Tūrangatukutuku". Depending on what headings come before it, I think it has the potential to be misleading. Discussion? Robin Patterson 00:52, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)

We are not obliged to follow all the guidelines set out for a Wikipedia that has over 1.1 million articles and is at the "polishing-up" stage. Each Wikipedia has created its own rules. To encourage growth here, at least until we have a few thousand articles, I think we should allow distinctly more than 10% of the links on a page to be "latent" (ie not "live" yet) wherever there is a reasonable likelihood that someone will create an article for the link within a few months. Robin Patterson 20:35, 11 Pipiri 2006 (UTC)

Robin, I think there is a price for encouraging growth at the expense of quality. No offence, but there several hundred articles on this Wikipedia that are low quality in terms of grammar, content, and aesthetics - the redlinks problem is only one aspect. The thing is, I see no evidence that anyone is removing links that have not resulted in articles within a few months. For an example of that, see Hotupuku. There are about 80 links in that article, and how many are red? 8? 16? - no, about 75 or so are red - and that is an article highlighted as a whārangi pai! It has been that way since Mahuru 2004, rather more than ‘within a few months’.

Is it fair or responsible to allow the number of substandard pages to grow into the thousands? The skills required to fix bad grammar are very rare. Someone may be totally fluent in the language, but that does not mean they have the rare skills to fix bad translations and grammatical heresies. It often takes several attempts to get all the errors out, it is not a simple task. Māori happen to care about our language - and we do not like to see it mangled and mistreated - it is not acceptable to allow the publishing of substandard Māori. Nor is it not acceptable to allow bad language to be put up and expect others to fix it. Nor is it acceptable to have lower standards for a site written in Te Reo - that indicates a total lack of respect for the language.

We need strategies to identify substandard articles and also to apply consistent categories to them. I have tried to improve the Hau Kāinga page, but I am severely limited by the quality of the articles and the lack of categorisation. I would like it to be a page to be proud of, and I would like this to be a site to be proud of too. The poor grammar and poor layout and poor content are real impediments to the growth and credibility of this site. Kahuroa 06:42, 12 Pipiri 2006 (UTC)

The fact that Hotupuku has been in a prominent place on our home page, but still contained a massive amount of redlinks, suggests that overlinking is not effective as a strategy to promote the writing of articles. It may behove us to take notice of the collective wisdom of the English Wikipedia and be willing to follow its quality standards rather than think we will get results by disregarding it. Our small size limits our ability to thrash things out and arrive at solutions that work on our own. Kahuroa 09:51, 12 Pipiri 2006 (UTC)

To put more responsibility on contributors to make better quality articles with references

To put more responsibility on contributors to find out how to write articles better

To put more responsibility on contributors to ask their real-world mentors or teachers whether what they propose to contribute is grammatically ok

Reduce redlinks and poor layout because aethetics is important on the web. It equals credibility

To show contributors that this is an encyclopedia, not a random collection of information

The reason is that otherwise there is far too great a burden left for others (like me) to fix up. At least if the errors are flagged, you can go to the category page and see how much is to be done, get a scope on the size of the problem

I don't want to be the only one fixing things, flagging things either. I need help. Like on the Hau Kāinga page. I would like to reformat the page. To do it I need all the articles under 'Awa' or 'X' to be in the category 'Awa' or 'X' and for the Awa catpage or the 'X' catpage to have been created. Its daunting to have to do everything before you can start things. Maybe those whose enthusiasm is good but they are worried about their reo could help with the housekeeping stuff.

Lets get all the articles we have in good condition. Then we can cope with new stuff as its added and bring it up to speed.

I'm happy to cooperate in (among other things) a flag-for-quality operation. Your Template:Hotowhero is OK and there could be others pointing out different shortcomings (apart from the long-established Template:stub). However, if any such flags refer to quality of Te Reo I would not be among the best people to decide where to put them. I said when I started here that I expected my contributions would be mostly housekeeping. Twenty-one months later there was still nobody doing quality content work to a really noticeable extent. Talk about burdens? I'm very glad that's changed. I'm not "worried" about my reo but you know it's probably not above the claimed mi-1. (Maybe a side-issue: why are "redlinks" less aesthetically pleasing than live links?)

Yeah I realise the problem with flagging of Te Reo. That has to be done by those who can see whats wrong. Redlinks and bluelinks are not instrinsically less aesthetically pleasing than each other, but it is a matter of excess of either and of the effect they have on the user's experience and on the functionality of the page. See the links on the hotowhero Template ( I added them to the article too didnt I) - overlinking is one of them, not just overredlinking. There are many reasons why its important. One thing the articles mention is that, with some qualifications, you shouldn't redlink unless you are prepared to write the article; another is not to link ordinary words; etc etc, no need for me to repeat. I will also try to make some more quality templates.

another idea I'd like your consideration of is whether I/you could approach someone (I have no idea who at the mo) about setting up some robot to macronise some words automatically. In principle it is the same as the job done on the enWiki by spelling correction robots. I have done macronisation for publication and for the web, so I am aware of some of the possible things to beware of, and it could only do some, not all of the macronisation because some macrons are grammatically determined rather than lexically determined. But I think its worth finding out. Same with redlinks. Kahuroa 00:19, 14 Pipiri 2006 (UTC)